Balance of Power

By Kathryn Harrison

Published: February 23, 2003

PROPERTY

By Valerie Martin.

196 pp. New York:

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. $23.95.

VALERIE MARTIN'S ''Property'' presents itself as a novel about the abuse of power within the loveless marriage between an antebellum plantation owner and his wife, their private suffering amplified by the social context of slavery. Bondage and its invitation to brutality are not unexplored terrain, but embedded within what might be mistaken as a morality play is a more subtle and compelling story -- a contest of wills between two women, Manon Gaudet and Sarah, the slave she received from her aunt as a wedding gift.

The year is 1828, and Manon begins her account with a simple, chilling declaration: ''It never ends.'' Everything in her life oppresses her. She finds pleasure nowhere, and especially not in the company of her husband, whom she measures against memories of her saintly father and finds lacking in every way. As a suitor, Mr. Gaudet had an aloof manner that made him seem mysterious, even sensitive, but once the couple began sharing a home Manon found him boorish, cruel and perverse. Now, years later, she realizes that she has traded her only asset, beauty, for material comfort and emotional violation. Or so she wants to convince us.

Raised by a father who retreated into chastity after his wife bore him three children, Manon herself is frigid and has conceived an unrealistic ideal for her libidinous husband. Despite the fact that his straying relieves her of conjugal obligations, she refuses to forgive him, especially because he has bedded her own slave and produced a mulatto as his only heir.

Walter, a wild child, literally deaf to those who would discipline him, whirls through the novel like a dervish, revealing the barrenness of the Gaudets' marriage. When a guest comes to dinner, the boy bursts into the dining room, squealing and shrieking, hurling himself into one and then another lap in a curiously satisfying performance that recalls Helen Keller before Annie Sullivan got hold of her. Despite his behavior, Walter looks like a cherub. His role, it becomes clear, is that of the holy fool, an innocent who alerts us to the sins of those we might mistakenly assume to be humane, or even civilized.

Manon tells the story of her marriage, forcing us to view it from her own perspective. We assume that she deliberately reveals her husband in a negative light, and so we try to take his actions at face value, preserving objectivity. He seems no better -- and not much worse -- than most men of his time and place and station. Overtures that Manon rejects as self-serving might also be interpreted as clumsy attempts at showing affection. In any case, the bedroom scenarios Manon presents damn her more than they do Mr. Gaudet.

In order to escape his lovemaking, Manon combines a sleeping tincture with alcohol to render herself insensate. ''I've not much interest in making love to a corpse,'' her husband protests. Manon is not too intoxicated to snap back, ''If I am dead . . . it is because you have killed me.'' Then, she tells us: ''He turned to look at me. To my surprise there were tears standing in his eyes.''

Those tears represent one of the few moments of unguarded emotion in this novel -- at least of any emotion save anger -- and they surprise us, both the fact of them and Manon's reporting of them. Is this the slip that confirms her in the role of unreliable narrator? After all, the first glimpse we had of Mr. Gaudet was a homoerotic scene on a riverbank in which he beat some black boys until he was visibly aroused.

Manon intends for us to hate him, but as the story unfolds we find her to be the character whose actions are more deviously cruel. When Sarah accompanies Manon to New Orleans to help tend her ailing mother, Manon takes the opportunity to violate her servant in a wholly unexpected, sexual and indelibly humiliating way. It is the most shocking scene in the novel, and it forces the reader to re-evaluate the dire competition between these two women.

Humiliated by what must be evident to everyone -- the bastard Walter bears his father's curly red hair and green eyes -- Manon is poisoned by rage, a self-righteous anger that she carefully nurtures. ''The fire in the grate burned low. . . . Another smoldered in my heart. I sat late in the cold room tending it, feeding it, until sparks ignited the dry tinder of my resentment, and it was as if I were sitting in a furnace.'' Her narrative seethes. Her gaze renders every object despicable. Her dreams are of vengeance and destruction, at last made possible by the insurgent, increasingly violent slaves of the neighboring plantations.

As cholera and yellow fever lay waste to New Orleans, killing off Manon's widowed mother in a scene of grotesque horror, escaped slaves gather in the woods and plot to burn and loot their masters' property. On the very evening Manon returns after burying her mother, the Gaudets' plantation is attacked by a band of slaves who kill Manon's husband and leave her for dead, her pretty face slashed, her shoulder so badly wounded that she will never regain the use of her arm. The skirmish unfolds against a chaotic backdrop of black night and leaping torchlight. After biting and scratching Manon in her frenzy to seize Mr. Gaudet's riderless horse, Sarah escapes.